A new study has examined a variety of global socio-economic scenarios to determine their impact on humanity's ability to limit global warming to the Paris Climate Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels (Ars Technica). The researchers developed computer models of five potential futures and determined that to achieve the goal, humanity will have to pull together to stop using coal to generate electricity before 2050, with oil use ended shortly thereafter, and turn to renewable power generation and biofuel plants. The researchers emphasise that this will have to be a global effort and warn that scenarios with "strong inequalities, high baseline fossil-fuel use, or scattered short-term climate policy" are doomed to fail. New figures from the UN illustrate the threat now posed by the phenomenon and indicate that 80 per cent of the people displaced by severe climate change today are women.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that the company's electric Semi trucks have set out to transport freight for the first time (Electrek). Posting a photo of the HGVs on Instagram, Musk wrote: "First production cargo trip of the Tesla Semi heavy duty truck, carrying battery packs from the Gigafactory in the Nevada mountains to the car factory in California". The distance is 250 miles (402km) – around half of the Semi's claimed range on a single charge.

New data gathered from the Juno probe in orbit around Jupiter is helping astrophysicists understand the origins of its distinctive coloured bands and the behaviour of the huge cyclone systems that rage close to the planet's poles (WIRED). At the North Pole, one central cyclone is surrounded by eight further cyclones, each of them with a diameter of 4,000 kilometres, making each one about as wide as Australia. At the South Pole, another central cyclone is surrounded by a further five cyclones, each one with a diameter of between 5,600 and 7,000 kilometres. “We have never seen similar structures on other planets of our Solar System,” says Alberto Adriani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, the lead author on the paper describing the cyclones.

Monday briefing: China reports slowest economic growth since 1990

To mark International Women's Day 2018, we asked some of the women we admire across the WIRED world to nominate a female innovator whose work they feel deserves greater recognition (WIRED). The women pushing boundaries across the fields of technology, science, design and innovation include Chinese rural e-commerce promoter Wang Qi, who brought subsistence farmers in her hometown and connected them with previously inaccessible markets across China; Tiffani Ashley Bell, the founder and executive director of The Human Utility, a startup that helps people in Detroit who can't afford to pay their water bills, and Maja Pantic, professor of Affective and Behavioral Computing at Imperial College London.

Every Oculus Rift VR headset on the planet stopped working for Windows users after the company failed to upgrade a critical security certificate used to authenticate Oculus's critical Runtime Services (Polygon). The company is working on the issue but said in a recent update post: "Unfortunately, pushing the update out to affected users has some added complexity, as the expired cert blocks our standard software update path. We're working through the options now, and we expect to have more details to share later this evening."

China's out of control space station, Tiangong-1, is set to come crashing back to Earth sometime around the first week of April, give or take a week. Predicting where debris from the 8.5-tonne orbiter may land is no easy task, say scientists, but they have identified two bands where it is most likely to scatter and say there is no probability of it landing north of 43ºN and south of 43ºS, eliminating about a third of the Earth's surface from the firing line.

WIRED 03.18 is out now. We go inside Didi Chuxing, the world's most valuable startup, which defeated Uber in China; meet the British couple who cost Google £2.1 billion, and go a little too deep inside the ICO bubble. Out now in print and digital. Subscribe and save.